So, last week my wife and I are driving around in a late-model car, one of the many I need to drive for evaluation. She's behind the wheel, and I've got the MapQuest printout with directions to our destination. It's dark--so while she focuses her attention on keeping the car between the striped line and the curb, I navigate, with the help of the handy map light built into the headliner.

There's a turn coming up, so I tell her we need to make a right at a specific mileage on the trip odometer, which I cleverly zeroed out as we left home. She's too involved in driving to find the trip odo on the dashboard, which is fine. I'd prefer that she maintain her focus and stay in her comfort zone while we're driving through relatively heavy traffic in the middle of town. I'll just read the trip odo myself.

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Except I can't. The trip odometer and the main odometer are well out of my line of sight, that is, unless I release my seatbelt and lean across to look over her shoulder. Which is a bad idea for two reasons: first, it crowds her, reducing her ability to concentrate; second, not wearing a seatbelt is always a really bad idea.

Why would they hide the odo from the passenger? Why can't it be positioned on the instrument panel where both can see it? Actually, I've asked this question of several interior designers at big car companies, and all I get is a blank stare. I think it's because they design the instrument panel and driver's binnacle in free space on a drafting board or big CAD tube, not inside anything like a car interior. Or maybe it's because they've never actually sat in the passenger seat while trying to navigate for the driver.

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Anyway, after unsuccessfully trying to navigate the old-fashioned way, I decide that maybe it would be better to fire up the GPS system on the dashboard. First, I have to hit the acknowledge button on the nav screen, which is warning me to be careful while using the system. Now it's time to key in the address of our destination. It's a laborious, mostly counterintuitive process, because the system wants the street name, number, city and state in no logical progression. Whatever.

Full stop. Literally. I can't key in the address unless the car is stopped, a prohibition intended to keep the driver's attention focused on the road, which is a good thing. But I'm not the driver. I'm sitting in the passenger seat with time on my hands. And the car's computer knows I'm sitting in the passenger seat, because it has intelligent airbags that only inflate when there's a body in the right seat.

I can, however, pick previous destinations from a menu, change the color of the display, reset the defaults, change the station on the satellite radio, fiddle with the graphic equalizer and check the temperature of the water in the cooling system. About the only thing I can't do is key in an address. If the driver can fool around with the system in 17 ways that will take his focus away from the road, what's so special about inputting an address? Is the legal department designing cars nowadays?

And I'm not even going to get into the problems, detours and generally bad routing some nav systems are guilty of when they're programmed and working. That's another column on another day.